Rich rewards often entail great risks, and exactly the same is true with the highly volatile cryptocurrency market. The uncertainties in 2020 globally generated a heightened interest of masses and large institutional investors in trading cryptocurrencies, a new-age asset class. Increasing digitization, flexible regulatory framework, and supreme court lifting ban on banks dealing with crypto-based companies have parked investments of more than 10 million Indians within the last year. Several major global cryptocurrency exchanges are actively scouting the Indian crypto market, which includes been showing a sustained surge in daily trading volume in the last year amid a huge drop in prices as much investors looked over value buying. While the cryptocurrency frenzy continues, many new cryptocurrency exchanges attended up in the united kingdom that permits buying, selling, and trading by offering functionality through user-friendly applications. WazirX, India’s biggest cryptocurrency trading platform doubled its users from million to two million between January and March 2021.

What’s Driving World’s Largest Crypto Exchanges to the Indian market?
In 2019, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trade volume, Binance acquired the Indian trade platform, WazirX. Another crypto start up, Coin DCX secured investment from Seychelles-based BitMEX and San-Francisco based-giant Coinbase. The crypto and blockchain start-ups in India have attracted investment of USD99.7 million by June 15, 2021, which totaled around USD95.4 million in 2020. Within the last few five years, global investment in the Indian crypto market has increased by way of a whopping 1487%.

Despite India’s unclear policy, global investors are making huge bets on the country’s digital coin ecosystem due to a number of factors such as

Tech-savvy Indian Population
The predominant population of 1.39 billion are young (median age between 28 and 29 years) and tech-savvy. As the older generation still prefers to invest in gold, CashTab real-estate, patents, or equities, the newer ones are embracing the high-risk cryptocurrency exchanges as they are more adaptable to them. India ranks 11th on Chainalysis’s 2020 report listing for global adoption of crypto, which shows the excitement about crypto one of the Indian population. Nor does the less-than-friendly attitude of the federal government towards crypto or rumors swirling across the crypto have the ability to shake the confidence of the youth population in the digital coin market.

India offers the lowest priced internet in the world, where one gigabyte of mobile data costs around $0.26 as the global average is $8.53. So, almost half the billion users are using affordable internet access, which enhances India’s potential to become one of the largest crypto economies in the world. In accordance with SimilarWeb, the united states may be the second-largest source of web traffic to peer-to-peer bitcoin trading platform, Paxful. As the mainstream economy continues to be struggling from the “pandemic effect”, cryptocurrency is gaining momentum in the united kingdom since it provides the young generation a new and fast method of earning money.

It is safe to express that cryptocurrency might become Indian millennials what gold is for their parents!

Rise of Fintech Start ups
The cryptocurrency craze generated the emergence of multiple trading platforms such as WazirX, CoinSwitch, CoinDCX, ZebPay, Unocoin, and many others. These cryptocurrency exchange platforms are highly secured, accessible across various platforms, and allow instant transactions, providing a friendly interface for crypto enthusiasts to buy, sell, or trade digital assets limitlessly. Many of these platforms accept INR for purchases and trading fees as little as 0.1% so simple, fast, and secure platforms present a lucrative chance for both first-time investors and local traders.

WazirX is one of the leading cryptocurrency exchange platforms with over 900,000 users that gives customers with peer-to-peer transaction capabilities. CoinSwitch Kuber provides the most effective cryptocurrency exchange platform for Indians and is ideal for beginners as well as daily doers. Unocoin is one of the oldest cryptocurrency exchange platforms in India that account for over a million traders through mobile applications. CoinDCX provides users with 100+ cryptocurrencies being an option to make exchanges and even provides investors with insurance to cover losses in case of a security breach. So, global investors are eyeing the plethora of cryptocurrency exchange platforms in India to take advantage of the emerging market.

Mixed Government Response
The legislative bill regarding a ban against a virtual currency that could criminalize anyone engaged in possession, issuance, mining, trading, and transferring crypto assets could easily get enacted into law. However, Finance and Corporate Affair Minister Nirmala Sitharaman eased some investor’s concerns saying that the federal government hasn’t planned to completely bar cryptocurrency use. In a record given to a respected English newspaper, Deccan Herald, the Finance Minister said, “From our side, we’re clear that individuals are not shutting all options. We allows certain windows for folks to do experiments on the blockchain, bitcoins, or cryptocurrency.” It is evident that the federal government continues to be scrutinizing the national security risks posed by cryptocurrencies before deciding on putting a whole ban.

In March 2020, the Supreme court overturned the central bank’s decision to ban financial institutions from dealing in cryptocurrencies, which prompted investors to pile to the cryptocurrency market. Inspite of the lingering fear of ban, transaction volumes continued to swell, and user registration and money inflows at local crypto-exchange became 30-fold from a year ago. Among India’s oldest exchanges, Unocoin added 20,000 users in January and February of 2021. The full total volume of Zebpay each day of Feb 2021 got comparable to the amount generated in the whole month of Feb 2020. Addressing the cryptocurrency scenario in India, the Finance Minister said in a CNBC-TV18 interview, “I can only just give you this clue that individuals are not closing our minds, we are considering ways in which experiments can happen in the digital world and cryptocurrency.”

Rather than sitting on the side-lines, investors and stakeholders want to really make the best of proliferating the digital coin ecosystem before the government introduces the ban on “private” cryptocurrency and announced sovereign digital currency.

Is India Heading Towards Financial Inclusivity with Cryptocurrency?
Once considered a “Boys club” as a result of predominant male population engagement in the cryptocurrency market, the steadily rising number of women investors and traders has generated more gender neutrality in the brand new and digital form of investment methods. Earlier, women used to adhere to traditional investments but now they are becoming risk-takers and venturing to the crypto space in India. Following the apex court clarified the legality of “virtual currency”, the Indian cryptocurrency platform, CoinSwitch witnessed an exponential 1000% increase in its women users. Although women investors still constitute a small percentage of the crypto community, they are setting up fierce competition in the Indian market. Women tend to save a lot more than their male counterparts and more savings means more diversity in investments such as high-return assets like cryptocurrencies. Also, women are more analytical and better at evaluating risks before making the right investment choices, so they are more successful investors.

Increasing Mainstream Institutional Adoption of Cryptocurrencies
Uncertainty and panic aroused by SARS-Covid 19 generated a liquidity crisis even prior to the economic crisis set off. Many investors converted their holdings into cash to safeguard their finances, which resulted in the collapsed prices of bitcoin and altcoin. But even though crypto suffered a significant crash, it still managed to be the most effective performing asset class of the season 2020. With the increased vulnerability of the machine and lack of rely upon the policies of the central bank and money in its current design, individuals have an elevated appetite for digital currencies which resulted in the rebound of cryptocurrency. As a result of stellar performance of cryptocurrency in the center of the global financial crisis, the uptrend has strengthened curiosity about the virtual currency market in Asia and the remaining world.

Furthermore, to fuel society’s demand for convenient and reliable transaction solutions, digital payment gateways such as PayPal have also shown their support towards cryptocurrencies that can enable consumers to put up, buy, or sell with virtual assets. Recently, Tesla CEO Elon Musk made an announcement of investment in the cryptocurrency market worth USD1.5 billion, and that the electric company would accept bitcoin from buyers, which generated an international bitcoin price jump from USD40,000 to USD48,000 within two days. Two of the greatest platforms to make payments across the planet, Visa and Mastercard are also endorsing cryptocurrencies by introducing them as a medium to make transactions. While Visa has recently made the announcement of allowing transactions with stable coins on the Ethereum blockchain, Mastercard would begin transactions with crypto sometime in 2021.

What does the future hold for the Cryptocurrency market in India?
The Indian cryptocurrency market isn’t immune to the terrible crypto crashes. Despite humongous investment from global counterparts, local investors remain maintaining distance from crypto investments as a result of uncertainty about the legality of the digital coin ecosystem in India as well as the high volatility of the market. Even though the cryptocurrency market is booming since this past year, Indians own significantly less than 1% of the world’s bitcoin, which creates a proper disadvantage for the Indian economy. The Indian government is planning to appoint a new panel to review the likelihood of regulating digital currencies in the united kingdom as well as give attention to blockchain technology and propose it for technological enhancements.

The ability of blockchain technology to provide a safe and immutable infrastructure has been realized by various industries to instill transparency in transactions. For a country with over 15 million crypto adopters, the brand new recommendation from the committee could hold great value to ascertain the future of cryptocurrency in India. However, the stakeholders feel that the technical and economic power is likely to make India an integral player in the crypto and blockchain market. Gradually, the cryptocurrency is gaining mainstream acceptance, which may lead to higher adoption of digital currency.